Wharton Professor Adam Grant Knows How to Build Stronger Bonds at Work

Recent research from Glassdoor suggests that people are now less interested in making friends at work. Having good friends or even a best friend at work has long been believed to be a retention driver. But today it’s getting harder. For many managers, a large part of the job is developing camaraderie even as teams are more distributed and working together in person less often.

Glassdoor’s analysis found that 53 percent of workers surveyed said they avoid making connections at work out of a direct effort to keep their personal and work lives separate, while nearly one-fifth each said that the remote environment (19 percent) and company culture (18 percent) are preventing them from making connections at work.

In a conversation with Newsweek, Adam Grant, professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and Glassdoor’s chief worklife expert, explained the commonly-held theory of the decline of “third spaces” such as bowling alleys, diners and other hangout spots putting pressure on the workplace to be a place of community.

However, after the pandemic, lockdown and a reconsideration of the role of work in people’s lives, it appears employees are veering to a place where work is more easily separated from one’s personal life. Grant added that shorter tenures and declining morale are not helping either.

One of the leading voices on the future of work and organizational psychology, Grant is a top-rated professor at the Wharton business school and a New York Times bestselling author who has consulted for Google and the NBA and has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He also shared that he recently learned to stop sending emails with ellipses, at the suggestion of his students.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Newsweek: How are people building camaraderie at work in the era of remote and hybrid work?

Adam Grant: There’s a great meta-analysis that [Florida International University management professor] Ravi Gajendran led that came out last year. It was a review of basically every study that’s ever looked at remote and hybrid work and the implications for satisfaction, performance and relationships.

What they show is, as long as you’re colocated with people at least half the week, there is no cost to your co-worker relationships to working from anywhere the other half of the week.

That’s very good news for hybrid work. I think that that’s echoed by [Stanford University economist] Nick Bloom’s recent research showing that if you’re in a hybrid structure where you come into work some days and you’re home one or two days, and your manager also doesn’t ding you, you perform just as well. You’re just as likely to get promoted.

So both with lateral and hierarchical relationships, I think what we’re learning is there’s a critical mass of in-person time that makes it easier to bond. And once you clear that threshold, which seems to be around the two-and-a-half or three day-a-week mark, that extra day or two doesn’t necessarily add that much. So if you imagine people are taking two days a week, or even one day a week, to do their deep-focus work at home, and then they’re expecting to be more collaborative and more social in the office, you potentially build stronger bonds in that kind of hybrid structure.

The other perspective I would put on the table is: It’s much easier to build relationships one on one than it is at the group level. I’ve seen a growing number of managers, anecdotally, who have said, “When we are in virtual meetings, let’s have people pair off. We’ll go into breakouts and let people get to know each other one on one.” That way, you can do a little bit more self-disclosure, sharing a little bit about your personal background, and I think there’s a lot to be said for that.

What do you make of shifting perceptions around friendship at work?

We don’t have those third places where a lot of bonding needs to happen. People aren’t, well, pick your favorite example…it’s the decline of bowling leagues, the vamping of book clubs, the decline of religious worship, all of these forces in America mean the places other than home and work to connect and build relationships and community seem to be fewer and farther between, and so that has put a lot of pressure on the workplace to be a source of affiliation, and most workplaces have really struggled to deliver.

People are now saying, “I don’t need to have a best friend at work. I don’t know if I would find one anyway, and I’m just going to temper my expectations and recognize this is a job. It pays the bills. It may be a career where I’m looking to move up the hierarchy. It may even be a calling where I’m finding a sense of purpose and meaning. But that does not mean that my workplace is going to be a family, or that I’m going to find close buddies there.” I think people seem to be a little bit more resigned to that fact.

Additionally, if the average person is staying around for less time than they used to, which empirically is true, you’re sort of stuck with a version of what Tyler Durden in Fight Club called single-serving friends: On an airplane, you sit down, you act like you have a real relationship, and then you never see each other again. And if work relationships are like that, people become more reluctant to invest.

Is there any generational correlation to feeling less interested in making friends at work?

When people have young kids at home, they want the flexibility to work from anywhere, which is also a time when they often feel like they have more bonds at home, and also they’ve had a little bit of time in the workplace to build up relationships. I wouldn’t necessarily call that a generational trend or even an age trend. It’s more of a life-stage trend.

At different life stages, the importance of work relationships waxes and wanes. What seems to be the case is that once all your kids are in school, you’re a little bit more inclined to show up for the office more and seek out that community a little bit. That also seems to be especially heightened among empty nesters. Those are normal fluctuations over the course of life transitions, as opposed to saying, “This is what one generation wants.”

What about for the manager-direct report relationship, which can sometimes evolve into mentorship or even friendship? How has that dynamic evolved in a hybrid working world where you don’t work together five days a week?

There’s a lot of discussion about creative collisions. And so when I talk with CEOs, for example, they’re really worried that we’re losing the water cooler and the spontaneous interactions that were great for bonding but also for generating new ideas.

The good news is there is nothing about creative collaboration that requires spontaneity. The reason that water coolers are great for creativity is two-fold.

First, at the water cooler, you run into weak ties, people that you don’t know well. There’s literally half a century of evidence that your weak ties are more likely to give you novel ideas and perspectives than your strong ties because they travel in different circles, they have access to different information, and so they can open up a fresh vantage point.

Whereas your strong ties, they tend to know a lot of the same people and same stuff. And so, what you think was this unplanned, spontaneous interaction at the water cooler was actually just [that] you ran into somebody who had a different perspective than yours. In a virtual environment, that tends not to happen. It’s hard to run into someone unless you schedule a virtual conversation with them.

The other feature of those creative collisions that really matters is informal interaction is good for creativity. So what’s different about the water cooler compared to a typical meeting is there’s not an agenda, it’s not overly formal or structural, and so it’s a little bit easier for people to spitball and let ideas fly.

In a hybrid environment, if you want to build relationships that are great for solving problems and generating ideas, you need to structure unstructured interaction with your weaker ties. That means you can’t just be meeting with the people you already know. You need to get time on the calendars of people that you don’t run into every day without necessarily a formal agenda or set of objectives.

There was a study that came out a couple years ago: If sales people were randomly assigned to have a 30-minute lunch together once a week, four months later, their individual revenue had gone up by 24 percent. This was mirroring those creative collision conditions. The salespeople were paired up, did not know each other well. They end up giving each other advice and tips and learning new strategies and discovering new potential markets and making referrals, and all of that was good for each of their abilities to generate leads and ultimately bring in revenue. I think that’s the kind of thing we need to do.